


A Way To Spend A Wedding Night

by SecondStarfall (beantiger)



Series: The Second Starfall Stories [25]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Asexual Character, Asexual Relationship, Asexuality, Comfort, Dorks in Love, F/F, Fairy Tale Elements, Fairy Tale Style, Fantasy, Flash Fic, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Suicide, LGBTQ Character, LGBTQ Themes, Lesbian Character, Marriage, Medieval, Mental Health Issues, Microfic, Nightmares, No Sex, Nudity, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, SFW I Promise!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-03
Updated: 2020-02-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:13:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22549876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beantiger/pseuds/SecondStarfall
Summary: That Marlesse suffered hurt the botanist in places she didn’t know she had—places far beyond the mind and into the spirit.***After their wedding, the royal botanist soothes her nightmare-plagued wife.
Relationships: Original Character(s)/Original Character(s), Original Female Character/Original Female Character
Series: The Second Starfall Stories [25]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1582975
Kudos: 13





	A Way To Spend A Wedding Night

**Author's Note:**

> **RECOMMENDED RE-READING:** These two gays got engaged in ["A Certain Necklace of Jade"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22059523) and talked about their wedding in ["Where One's Soul Wants To Wander."](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22239208) This piece takes place the night of their wedding.
> 
> ✨ [[see the full SecStar timeline](https://secondstarfall.com/index.php/Official_Timeline) | [check out the SecStar wiki](https://secondstarfall.com/)] ✨

In a tower, in a castle, two women wed. And after their guests had retreated for the evening, the bride Valériane de la Rue said to her wife, “I'm very proud of you, you know. You haven’t slept for days, and yet you went through with this all.”

Marlesse de la Mer, the chief of the castle guard, stopped untangling the elaborate braids from Valériane’s hair. “Untrue! I slept two hours last night, and three the night before.”

“Alright—so—that’s not a real amount of sleep, my love. We could have put the wedding off. We could have said you fell ill,” Valériane replied. She looked into the mirror the queen had purchased for them both as a gift. Valériane, squatting on a stool, wore a silken white shawl, over which a long strand of jade beads hung. Next to her, Marlesse sported an unbuttoned brocade vest.

“You, worried!” Marlesse said. “Catch me, I may faint.”

“For the love of—am I not allowed to wish for your continued health? This may be a very short marriage.”

“Well, I'm not ill, little creature.”

“If my own melancholy is a disease, then so are your nightmares, so are all those thoughts you—”

The smile on Marlesse’s face twitched, but didn’t falter. Nonetheless Valériane reached up to wrap an arm around her neck, and Marlesse pressed her nose to her scalp. Valériane was the royal botanist, and her wife had often said she smelled sweetly of her work. 

“I’m sorry for pushing,” Valériane said. 

And she was. That Marlesse suffered hurt the botanist in places she didn’t know she had—places far beyond the mind and into the spirit.

“You couldn’t push anyone,” Marlesse replied. “You’re three inches tall.”

“How about we leap beyond our banter tonight? For once?”

Now the smile disappeared, and Marlesse’s eyes grew glassy. She seemed to look beyond Valériane and into the distance. Valériane stood on the stool and (because her wife had a foot and a half on her, if not more) crawled up into the guard’s arms.

“I'm here,” the botanist cooed.

“Do you remember when you told me I deserved better than you?” 

Of course Valériane remembered: she’d tried very hard to die then. But she’d made a mistake in the process. That was a year and a half ago. The botanist could not recall why she’d felt so untouchably heartbroken, as if her life had amounted to one long farce, as if she’d faced cruelty from all directions. In times like these—the lovely times, short and fleeting as they could be—she never knew much else.

On the other hand, old memories twisted around Marlesse every day. She’d been a soldier, and Valériane knew that somewhere within Marlesse, steel still clattered—though, of course, she never pushed the guard to discuss it.

Valériane withdrew from her. “Yes. And you ignored the question, as you should have, because it was a ridiculous one.”

She pulled the guard across the room to the little cot they so often shared. Or, rather, piled upon in a heap. The botanist appreciated her solitary life, appreciated this quiet tower she had won from the queen, but she had furnished it for one person. She had never expected love, though she’d thought about it often. She had never expected Marlesse, who became not some obnoxious brute infringing upon her silence, but—

An echo in her mind, a pulse in her veins.

“I know you want to ask me if I think I deserve better than you,” Valériane said, perching behind Marlesse on the cot.

“Am I so simple?...oh, of course I am.”

“Never.”

Marlesse did not reply as she sat at the cot’s edge. Valériane tossed her wife’s clothes, and soon her own shawl and dress, across the tower. The two found lovemaking unnecessary, but shared skin comforted them both. Only the jade pendant, Valériane’s, remained between them. She took it off and lay the beads around the guard’s neck. 

“There I stood at the altar,” Marlesse said. She clutched the pendant in her fists. “Dark circles under my eyes, your bride, and…”

“Yes, and despite your love, I’ve tried to die, more than once. Me, your bride. Deserving is a debate for the scholars. I do choose you, though, all the time. Including today. And...always.”

“That is, I believe, the most romantic thing you’ve ever said.” Marlesse grinned weakly. “My love, the poet, the bard.”

Valériane leaned forward to kiss her cheek. “You're incredibly unamusing.”

Laughter passed between them. They both lie back on the cot, legs twined. 

“Try to sleep, but if not,” Valériane said, “if not—we can talk. You can tell me about your wounds, if you feel you can, if you feel it would help you. And I can tell you about mine. Ah, they are...something.”

“Hm. Is that a way to spend a wedding night?”

When Valériane nestled close to Marlesse, the jade beads pressed against her forehead.

“It’s a way to spend ours.”

**Author's Note:**

> Leave a comment or a kudos or whatever the heck if this tickled your fancy. There shall be more! ❤️ Also, please let me know what other characters, relationships, or places you'd like to hear about. I have lots of ideas, but I'd enjoy writing a few stories for y'all as well.
> 
> ✨ [[see the full SecStar timeline](https://secondstarfall.com/index.php/Official_Timeline) | [check out the SecStar wiki](https://secondstarfall.com/)] ✨
> 
>  **AUTHOR'S COMMENTARY:** Many of my stories, if viewed from the perspective of your average cishet creative writing teacher, are self-indulgent. Many, again viewed from that pedestal, are barely stories. I admit that. But I'm also gay and trans and autistic and so I present my prose differently, just as I present myself differently. Sometimes I only want to offer the world a lovely vignette of two asexuals figuring things out with cuddles. We queers need that as much as we need epic narratives.


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